[WiP] RadBox Engineering - Development Division

[salsathegeek]

Welcome to RadBox Engineering. From our humble beginnings making nuclear powered lunchboxes for the working Kerbal, we've begun expanding into the world of space exploration and communications technologies. Our first entry into this exciting new market is the FlatPakSat series of modular satellite parts. Originally a prototype pizza delivery system, our engineers realized it could do so much more than explode hot, cheesy goodness and scalding tomato sauce all over boardroom members Kermani suits by replacing the pizza with state of the art electronics sourced from their kid's finest and/or most obnoxious toys. Please check out our KerbyGoGo campaign to get in on the ground floor and find out how you too can start your own multi-thousand satellite constellation that's sure to have the astronomy guys battering down your door with torches and pitchforks. Call us for our bulk order specials! Order Now!

**NOTE: RadBox Engineering (RBE) accepts no responsibility for what happens with proper or improper use of the FlatPakSat series of parts. RBE does not recommend using the FlatPakSat series of parts for any delivery, pizza or otherwise. RBE is also not responsible for the results of any mob of angry astronomers. Induce rampages at your own risk. Ask your doctor before using FlatPakSat parts in any exercise regimen involving running away from explosions.

Hey, I hope you'll forgive the above silliness. I am working on some graphics to pretty this post up, but I only have access to Illustrator at work, and, well, Inkscape doesn't like the font I'd like to use for the graphics, so here we are. I'm hoping to have more mods than just the FlatPakSats, but I thought that they were a good starting project to cut my teeth on. Besides, it let me reference all of the uproar (okay, okay, it's more like a dull roar) in the Astronomy community over Starlink's recent launch and all of the implications that didn't seem to dawn on people when the FCC approved the launch of the constellation. That's neither here nor there, so enough rambling from this wreck and on to the star of the show!

Look at the beauty of a cylinder! Some of my best work! 

EDIT: Forgive the loopiness. I couldn't sleep, so I worked on this instead.

A couple of iterations later from the back. The middle one is the one that's the most recent. The wireframe modifier didn't do like I had expected. It's getting closer, but still not what I want.

From the front, if the front is the show side. 

Link to the imgur post.

So, the star isn't the 32-sided bombshell (her measurements are 62.5cm, 62.5cm, and 62.5cm and a spritely meter tall), it's the strange looking doohickey to the right. I decided to work on the engine first since I had a good idea of what I wanted. I'm planning on just going with what feels right for it. It'll be an ion engine, but I'd like to have monoprop, and LFO versions at some point. As you may have guessed, the Starlink satellites are a major inspiration for this project, and I don't think there's any current mods that provide parts that you can use to make small satellites that can be launched like Starlink was/will be.

That said here's the plan:

Phase 1

• Basic FlatPakSat Profile (0.3125m x 0.1m)
  • Engines
    • Ion
    • Monoprop
  • Fuel Tanks
    • Monoprop
    • Xenon
  • Drone Core
  • RCS Blocks
  • Communications block
  • Battery block
  • Decoupler
• Attachments
  • Communications Antennae
  • Solar Panels

Phase 2

• More Profiles
• Adapters for stock profiles
• LFO Engines
• Power plants
• More attachments
  • Lights
  • Landing legs
  • Science Experiments

Phase 3 and beyond

• Mod integration (Mods to be determined)
• Refining profiles and parts
• Adapters for mod profiles
• Any new parts I or others might think of

At least that's the plan for the FlatPakSats. I've got a couple other mod ideas that I'd like to do, but they require more knowledge and skills than I currently have to carry through. You can see them below. The first iteration of the FlatPakSats will be focusing on a simple stack. I'm thinking about having cores that other parts, like the tanks and RCS blocks fit into to allow for more customization, but I'm not sure how well that'd work.

FlatPakSats GitHub Repo - For the latest and greatest and if you want to fork it to see everything I did wrong. (And I mean everything. I think I even managed to mess up the directory structure.)

 

Other Mod Ideas

• An industrial lander, rover, and base parts mod inspired by @riocrokite's Mobile Frame System. Would likely have IR parts and would definitely have mining and resource parts.
• A near-future space-plane parts mod like OPT and B9.
• Launcher, lander, rover, and station expansions for the above, maybe?

I would like to hear what you think and what you'd like to see in these mods.

 

Edited June 23, 2019 by salsathegeek
Added GitHub link for FlatPakSats

[salsathegeek]

Okay, redid some work, but I'm much happier with how this is turning out. From top to bottom these are roughs for the tanks, the RCS thruster module, and the ion engine. Behind the parts you can see the reference for the profile of these parts and to the left is a 50cm long, 62.5 cm diameter cylinder (Size 0 in the game)  used mainly to show how small these parts are. I'm shooting to keep a complete satellite about 60 to 70 cm long, but we'll see how that works out. One thing I am happy about is that the design of the RCS thruster module means that you only need eight ports to get full control. It's also large enough that I could add a monoprop tank in there and not have to worry about if it'd be realistic. Next up is figuring out how to add some interest to the connection faces and what detail to add to the engine module. I think I'm going to be working on a support frame for the tanks as well. Speaking of, the cutout in the top and bottom of the tank part is for letting communications antennae and solar panels lay flat while this is being launched and deployed.

[hieywiey]

This looks interesting. Will integration with DMagic Orbital Science and/or SCANSat be planned? As I think that this would really fit in with those mods, since a small, easily deployable satellite bus would work well with those mods, and as a substitute for satellite internet.

[salsathegeek]

 

20 hours ago, hieywiey said:

This looks interesting. Will integration with DMagic Orbital Science and/or SCANSat be planned? As I think that this would really fit in with those mods, since a small, easily deployable satellite bus would work well with those mods, and as a substitute for satellite internet.

Eventually, but not for a little while. I still need to work on the Phase 1 stuff. Glad to know I'm not the only one who's been wanting a small satellite platform to use for their games. Makes me more confident that I have a good niche to fill!

Edited June 21, 2019 by salsathegeek

[hieywiey]

2 hours ago, salsathegeek said:

Eventually, but the 

Eventually, but not for a little while. I still need to work on the Phase 1 stuff. Glad to know I'm not the only one who's been wanting a small satellite platform to use for their games. Makes me more confident that I have a good niche to fill!

I guess the main reason why smallsat mods are not in abundance is due to the fact that they're difficult to assemble, since the VAB/SPH camera can only zoom in so far. Another reason I'd love this is to launch tens of satellites like this in orbit around Kerbin or another body with SCANSat to quickly map the body in much shorter time than with only one satellite (on slowly rotating bodies, i.e. Moho, scanning will take AGES). Another use is a deployable subsatellite, kinda like the MarCO satellites that launched with InSight.

[salsathegeek]

1 minute ago, hieywiey said:

I guess the main reason why smallsat mods are not in abundance is due to the fact that they're difficult to assemble, since the VAB/SPH camera can only zoom in so far. Another reason I'd love this is to launch tens of satellites like this in orbit around Kerbin or another body with SCANSat to quickly map the body in much shorter time than with only one satellite (on slowly rotating bodies, i.e. Moho, scanning will take AGES). Another use is a deployable subsatellite, kinda like the MarCO satellites that launched with InSight.

That's one reason, but the idea is that these would only be about ten or twelve parts apiece. The're small, sure, but I think it'll be easy enough to assemble, and you can make a subassembly for the base satellite and just add the mission-specific stuff once you have it added to your craft. I think this is going to be the smallest I go at any rate. I'd like for these to be general purpose and much smaller would make it way too fiddly without getting into very specialized and complex parts, I think.

If SCANSat integration doesn't look too difficult, I may tackle that once the phase 1 release is done.

More progress on the tanks. The second image has the previous version for reference.

Okay, I like these new tanks a lot more. The downside is they have a lot of polys. The 10cm tank has about 1100 tris and the 20cm tank has about 1900 tris. That's a bit much for detail that's going to be hidden I think and I still have done the bracing around the tanks. I've got a couple of options, I think.

1. Ditch the detail and imply the structure through less demanding means.
2. Do 1, but keep the detailed version as a variant tank.
3. Keep on with this version and accept that it's going to be heavy.

Personally, I'm leaning towards 1 with 2 as a distant second, but maybe I'll feel differently when I've slept on it.

[hieywiey]

2 hours ago, salsathegeek said:

[Snip]

I do think that the interior polys that are only going to be hidden with normal use should be a variant. Also, what do you anticipate the style of texturing to be like? Stockalike, Restockalike, BDB-like, or something else?

[salsathegeek]

17 hours ago, hieywiey said:

I do think that the interior polys that are only going to be hidden with normal use should be a variant. Also, what do you anticipate the style of texturing to be like? Stockalike, Restockalike, BDB-like, or something else?

I'll be shooting for Stock-a-like textures at least until I get some skill at it, then I'll probably go with Restockalike as a variant. I'm not sure about BDB. It feels like their supposed to be stock-a-like, but they feel off.

As for the tanks and other bits, I'm going to be getting rid of the interiors. I wasn't really happy with the way the supports came out for the profile with the recesses anyway.

[salsathegeek]

Okay, this is odd. I was planning on backing some AO into the texture to give the part around the Ion engine some depth, and this happened when I tried to bake it. Anyone have any ideas what's going on? The glow mesh is black though it should be white to gray and there's this big black circle that matches the hole for the ion engine. No clue how it got there, either. I think I'll just save it for later and just try getting the texture painted.

[salsathegeek]

So, there's issues, but before i get into them.

Woo! It's in the game! Even better! It works!

ish.

So there's a couple of issues with it. The first is the collision mesh, and the second is all the screwed up stuff in the config. I'm not even sure that the emissives are working correctly, for example (though that's mainly because of the collision mesh)

I also apparently royally messed up the orientation on this thing. It's hard to tell because it's so small, but it's supposed to be pointing nozzle up. Instead, it's pointing to the left. Thankfully, it's a square from the side, and since the plume seems to be right (if waaaaaay too big.) It also seems my fears about this being fiddly as all get out are well founded. I'm going to have to see what I can do to minify the node sizes in the VAB.

But that's a problem for tomorrow's Salsa. This Salsa is going to be proud he figured out how to do this and go relax. There's a GIT repository for those that want to take a look and tell me everything I did wrong. You can find it up above in the first post or here. Honestly, I could use all of the help I can get. I've included the source files and the GameData files if you want to see (Also included the unity project used to get the thing into KSP. Oops.) Right now, my priority is to get the engine working. After that, I'm going to sit down and nail down how I need to structure this project so I don't keep worrying about if I've got things in the right place.

[salsathegeek]

So, after some research, I've found that I should have modeled it in a different orientation. Now that I know that, time to see if I can do a better job this time around.